Life and Death in Palestine: Information gift for a Premier — Day 5

Survivor of 1948 Israeli-led expulsion of Palestinians to tell her story in upcoming Canadian tour.

No 1650 Posted by fw, April 25, 2016

As a reminder, scholar and educator Herbert Thelen inspired this protest project: “To act ignorantly when knowledge is available, to deny realities that patently exist and make a genuine difference, is the worst crime of civilized man.”

Israel’s crimes against Palestinians in the Occupied Territories are realities that patently exist. Why, then, when this knowledge is readily available, would Premier Wynne decide to lead a trade mission to Israel? I suggest this was not a responsibly informed decision.

Today, Day 5 of my letter-a-day campaign to share with the Premier information gifts from alternative online news sources not readily found in North America’s mainstream news media, I sent the following message.

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Monday, April 25, 2016

Dear Premier Wynne,

Below is my information gift for you on this, Day 5, of my project to fill in some possible gaps in your knowledge base with respect to life and death in the Israeli Occupied Territories.

I urge you not to miss this once in a lifetime opportunity.

On Tuesday, May 10, five days before your May 15 departure to Israel, Mariam Fatallah, now 86 years old and respectfully known as Umm Akram (mother of Akram), will be in Toronto to tell her story of expulsion from her Palestinian village in 1948. She wants to be sure that others know what happened to her and over 700,000 refugees.

For more information and details about the location of the event, see below.

As regular readers of my blog [Two Words: Notes and Observations] will know by now, Nakba or catastrophe is the term used to describe the expulsion of more than 700,000 Palestinians from their homes and the razing of their villages to make way for the creation of the State of Israel in 1948. Of course, many Nakba survivors have died by now but I was interested to spot this piece on Peter Larson’s blog about an upcoming Canadian tour by some of them. No doubt the shameless JDL [Jewish Defence League] and its ilk will be there to harass and bully those who attend but I’m sure the opportunity to hear these survivors’ stories first-hand will be worth the trouble.

Umm Akram

In a decade or so, the voices of the original Nakba survivors will be extinct. But 86-year-old Mariam Fatallah remembers clearly being expelled from her village in 1948. She wants to be sure that others know what happened to her and hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees. She is making a tour of the USA and Canada to share her memories of expulsion and of living as a refugee in Lebanon.

Mariam Fatallah, now 86 years old and respectfully known as Umm Akram (mother of Akram), has spent the last 68 years in crowded, makeshift refugee camps in Lebanon. She has raised three generations in the same camps, all waiting to return to their home in Palestine. She has lived through five Israeli invasions of Lebanon, as well as the 1976 Tel al-Zaatar camp massacre that killed more than 2,000 of the refugees there.

Umm Akram wants meet you and tell her story in person. So does Amena Ashkar, her granddaughter and great granddaughter of other Nakba survivors, who has known no other home than refugee camps.

Umm Akram and Amena have a different message from other Palestinians. They are among six million Palestinians not living in Palestine – more than those who are. They are citizens of no government at all, not even the Palestinian Authority. They are not living under Israeli occupation. Israel does not allow them to visit their homes, much less live there. Amena has never met an Israeli, and Umm Akram not since 1948. As exiles, they have a different perspective from Palestinians in Jerusalem, the West Bank, Gaza and the part of Palestine that became Israel.